1. Field
One or more embodiments of the present invention relate to methods of compressing and restoring configuration data.
2. Description of the Related Art
Reconfigurable architecture refers to an architecture in which a hardware configuration of a computing device may be changed to optimally perform a specific task. When a task is processed only in a hardware manner in a computing device, it is difficult to efficiently carry out the task if changes occur during the processing of the task. This difficulty is caused because of fixed functions of the hardware. In contrast, if a task is processed only in a software manner, the task may be processed by reconfiguring the software if changes occur during the process of the task. However, the processing speed when the task is processed in a software manner is slower than when the task is processed in a hardware manner.
The reconfigurable architecture may be implemented to satisfy efficiencies obtainable when a task is processed in both of the software and hardware manners. Particularly, reconfigurable architecture has drawn more attention from the digital signal processing field in which a specific task is repeatedly processed.
Among various types of reconfigurable architecture, a coarse-grained array (CGA) is a representative reconfigurable architecture. Recently, a reconfigurable architecture utilizing a specific processing unit of a CGA as a very long instruction word (VLIW) machine has been introduced.